AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Neural Correlates Negative symptoms: The ventral striatum is involved with reward anticipation. Schizophrenia patients have been found to have less activity in this region-the lower the activity, the more severe the negative symptoms. This could explain avolition (loss of motivation).

Detailed explanation-2: -The ventral striatum is a subcortical brain region innervated with dopaminergic neurons and involved in tracking the subjective value of stimuli, signaling the presence of/expectation of reward, and encoding errors and outcomes of such predictions (Knutson et al., 2001; Phan et al., 2002; Eldar et al., 2016).

Detailed explanation-3: -The dorsal striatum consists of the caudate nucleus and putamen (CP) that controls motor and cognitive function (1, 5). The ventral striatum consists of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and olfactory tubercle (OT) that regulates the limbic function of motivation, affect, and reward (8–11).

Detailed explanation-4: -The ventral striatum is critically involved in emotion processing and reward-based learning. In schizophrenia, task-fMRI studies on reward and emotion processing also revealed a link between activity changes in the ventral striatum and negative symptoms.